bicop Read bind-style configuration files Introduction ============ *bicop* is a python library to process ISC bind-style configuration files. These are nested structures that look like this:: datasource1 { server "server1.your.domain"; username "client"; password "secret"; extra { isolation "full"; }; }; tables { "users"; "groups"; }; Parsing ======= Parsing is trivial using the ''parse'' method:: from bicop import parse parse("/etc/bind/named.conf") This returns a standard python dictionary with all data read from the file. Entries in the dictionary can be other dictionaries or lists. Merging ======= A common need is to be able to support default values for configurations or to handle configuration at multiple levels with priorities, for example a uer configuration overriding entries from the system-wide configuration. To support this bicop has a utility method that can merge dictionaries. You can use it like this:: from bicop import parse from bicop import merge configuration=parse("/etc/application.conf") userconfig=parse("/home/user/.application") merge(configuration, userconfig, overwrite=True) Easy access for nested dictionaries =================================== Configuration files in this format can have deeply nested structures. Accessing those using standard python dictionaries is a slightly cumbersone. To make this a bit more pleasant on the eyes you can use the NestedDict wrapper:: from bicop import parse from bicop import NestedDict configuration=NestedDict(parse("/etc/application.conf")) print "Your signature is: %s" % configuration["profiles/user/signature"] Wichert Akkerman - Simplon da26afb14d62ed12e462ce3a9d6c0df42aa616f8 1.0rc1